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Puppy to Slackintosh: the week's distros

By admin | July 22, 2007

Another week and another set of new Linux releases. Tectonic does a quick roundup of what’s new on the Linux distribution front.

We start with two alpha releases, one from Ubuntu and the other from OpenSuse.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3

The Ubuntu team this week released Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3, which will in time become Ubuntu 7.10.

In an announcement the team said: “Pre-releases of Gutsy are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, or even frequent, breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

“The Tribe images are known to be reasonably free of show-stopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Gutsy.”

In an email announcng the release Stephan Kulow said that this is “the first alpha release containing the new refactored libzypp software management library. The goal was to deliver a working version for this alpha, so expect rough edges, unusal slowdown and behavior, for example YaST integration is really alpha quality.

The past week saw the release of Puppy Linux 2.17, a lightweight distribution that comes in at just 82.6MB in size.

In its announcement the Puppy Linux team said that the major changes in this release were the improvements in hardware support. Key changes include enhanced dialup support with the new PupDial graphical interface, the inclusion of CUPS for printing in Puppy Linux, and the ability to boot from both USB attached CD and DVD drives. Puppy Linux 2.17 is built on the 2.6.21.5 kernel.